Getting to Know the General (11 page)

The women, quite apart from the wealth of their rings and their fashion of dressing in a rather similar style to Ancient Egyptians, were interesting to watch. The long-haired girls were unmarried: those with hair cut short were married. A distinction was made between them, even in the use of musical instruments. When they danced for us, at a fixed and very moderate fee, the unmarried rattled gourds and the married played on little bundles of pipes. They contribute to the Cuna economy by embroidering squares of material called
molas
for use as blouse fronts. That day I was with Camilo and Lidia, the wife of Rogelio. It was her birthday and she chose a
mola
for me to give her, but this was to be stolen from her a few days later under odd circumstances typical of life in Panama City.

In the evening Chuchu came to see me. He told me that Omar wanted me to go with the Panamanian delegation to Washington in five days’ time for the signing of the Canal Treaty, the terms of which had at last after all these years been agreed. The
Miami Herald
that morning claimed that it was no different from the draft treaty of 1967, proposed before the General took power, but this was completely false – perhaps it was an attempt by the Americans to stir up internal trouble against Torrijos. The new Treaty would transfer immediately fifty times more territory to Panama than the old draft had done. The American military bases, it was true, were to remain until the year 2000 and only then would the Canal become entirely the property of Panama. However, the Zone, apart from these bases, would immediately cease to exist.

I felt unwilling to go to Washington. I had booked my return flight, and it was time I returned to France and to my proper work. I told Chuchu that I had no visa for the States, a white lie for it was no longer true. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘you will have a diplomatic passport, a Panamanian one.’

‘I don’t want to come back all the way here to catch my plane to Amsterdam.’

‘You won’t have to. The General will book you on the Concorde direct from Washington to Paris.’ He said the General was already being attacked because the Treaty was not as good as people had hoped. He had made a speech to the students, saying, ‘I am making what progress I can, but if I don’t have the support of progressives, what can I do more?’

I gave in. ‘If the General really wants me to go,’ I said.

‘He really wants it.’

That evening I went to the temporary home of a Nicaraguan woman writer who had been tortured by Somoza’s Guardia. Only the day before she had successfully had a baby. She would say little for fear of the repercussions on her family, and one could tell from her tormented face how much she wanted to forget the past. But there were others in the room who had also suffered and were ready to talk. An Argentinian woman described the electric torture which she had endured. Another Argentinian told of a bayonet thrust up her vagina. A Peruvian told of his expulsion, a Nicaraguan of his escape from a police ambush. For how many people, from how many countries in Latin America – Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador – Panama had become a haven of escape, thanks to the General. It had not been like this in the days of the Arias family.

5

I was suffering the result of my search in the woods of El Valle for a square tree. An irritation in my ankles kept me awake every night, so on Chuchu’s advice I went to see a young black doctor at the barracks of the National Guard. He gave me a wash, a cream and some tablets and told me I had been bitten by a tiny insect called a
chitra
only too familiar to the Wild Pigs. Afterwards we went to the airport to meet a Mexican film producer who was trying to arrange the co-production of an anti-military film. He had been offered support in Mexico, Colombia, France and Cuba, but Panama was the only country which was prepared to lend him troops.

I think Chuchu’s exuberance puzzled him. He had not been accustomed to deal with a security guard who was also a poet and a professor. He looked bewildered and innocent.

Camilo too was at the airport. He was smartly dressed and looked very much the young doctor, and he was off on a mysterious Sandinista errand to Mexico City. He had entrusted me some days before with a letter to an address in Paris which he wanted me to post on my return to France, but now that he knew I was going by way of Washington he was very worried about its security. ‘You mustn’t leave it in your luggage,’ he told me. ‘They are sure to search your luggage in Washington. Promise me that you’ll always keep it on you, even at night.’ I promised.

A man came to fetch the Mexican film producer, who had been listening with growing bewilderment to my conversation with Camilo. The ‘someone’ was accompanied by a quite hideous woman, a Venezuelan with dyed red hair, who seemed to me obviously in pursuit of Chuchu.

We escaped on that occasion, but nobody in Panama City only turns up once. Like a play with a small cast the same actors were always reappearing in different roles. In the course of that muddled evening I had been supposed to meet a Peruvian refugee, but the meeting was cancelled at the last moment, so I suggested to Chuchu that we should take Camilo’s wife to dinner as she might be feeling lonely without him. But for some reason Chuchu couldn’t find Camilo’s house, though we had been there several times together, and for a yet more impenetrable reason he was convinced that María Isabel would be telephoning us at the house of Panama’s ambassador to Venezuela – or was it the other way round, Venezuela’s ambassador to Panama? – and the ambassador, he was sure, would give us a typical Venezuelan dinner, whatever that might signify. Of course, María Isabel didn’t telephone us, it was the hideous Venezuelan woman who turned up (had Chuchu foreseen that?) and the ambassador never asked us to dinner. Indeed, I don’t think he could understand what we were doing at his house. So we left, passing on the doorstep the Mexican film producer, who appeared more bewildered than ever at seeing us, and Chuchu and I had some chicken soup together at my hotel.

These last days in Panama unwound more and more quickly and confusingly. I hadn’t seen Omar for some days – it was as though in the past he had been directing events and now the disorder, which involved a Mexican film producer and a Venezuelan woman and Chuchu’s lapse of memory, arose from his absence. I had to get up very early the next morning because Omar wanted me to fly to a collective buffalo farm (an odd thing to find in Panama) in the mountain village of Coclesito. The farm had been started by Omar, who had built himself a small house nearby, after he had had made a forced landing in Coclesito in a helicopter and seen the hopeless isolation and poverty of the inhabitants. Their smallholdings had been washed out by a flood in which the chief’s son had been drowned. What gave the General the idea of a buffalo farm I never learnt. I was fetched by María Isabel, who complained bitterly that Chuchu had made a muddle the night before over my rendezvous with the Peruvian refugee. And why on earth had we gone to the Venezuelan ambassador’s house? Was it possible, I wondered, that it was because Chuchu wanted to see the hideous woman again?

Chuchu was waiting at the airport for the military plane which he had ordered and with him were a number of students from Guatemala, Ecuador and Costa Rica accompanied by their professors. Our journey to see the buffaloes was obviously meant to be an educational one, but we waited and waited and no plane arrived. Apparently the pilot, an air force officer, resented having been given orders by a mere sergeant. After two hours we sent a message to the General’s secretary that it was too late now for the buffaloes and we all trooped off to the Ministry of Culture where we were joined by the two Ultras and the Sandinista mathematician, Rogelio, and we had to sit through a long and boring videotape film of Panama folk dancing. I have always detested folk dancing since I was a boy when I had watched men morris-dancing in braces. (The dances appealed particularly for some mysterious reason to their wives, who wore shot-silk dresses bought at Liberty’s.)

In the middle of the film Chuchu was called away on an urgent errand. A Guatemalan professor recommended by the Dean of Guatemala University (the one who had been so drunk with Chuchu at David) had apparently been imprisoned some days before by the G-2 and charged with trying to pass forged dollar bills at the Continental Hotel.

María Isabel, the Ultras and I were invited after the film to lunch by Señor Ingram, the Minister of Culture, and while we were drinking our cocktails Chuchu arrived with the Rector of Panama University and the Guatemalan professor straight from the prison, a tall, red-haired, good-looking man of Yankee and German origin who naturally seemed a little confused about what was happening to him. He had not expected this sudden transfer from his prison cell to drink cocktails and eat a good lunch at Panama’s best restaurant. Nor could he understand what an English writer was doing there, for appparently he had read some of my books and distrusted me. He told us that he had been threatened with violence by the G-2 officers, and he had shared his cell with seven other men, including two rapists – one had killed the girl whom he had raped – and one patricide. All of them, however, had proved very sympathetic and with their professional knowledge they had helped him to smuggle a message out of prison – a message which contained the recommendation from the Dean of Guatemala University. The General, when he received it, decided that the whole affair was probably a plot by the Guatemalan police against a professor who was known to be left-wing, so he at once ordered his release, but a discreet one by means of Chuchu, and he thought it wiser all the same for the professor to return after a few days of relaxation to Guatemala. What we saw of the professor later made me doubt whether he was quite as innocent as he had claimed.

This continued to prove one of my more confusing Panamanian days. Nothing went quite right, and I soon began to feel just as bewildered as the Guatemalan professor and the Mexican film producer. Chuchu and I had planned to dine together on something more substantial this time than chicken soup. He asked me, ‘Do you mind if I bring the thin girl [the gangster’s wife] to dinner? I want to sleep with her tonight.’ He telephoned and I heard him say that we would be outside the block where she lived in five minutes.

Round and round the block we drove and no one came, so we went to a café, where a group of reactionaries were drinking and maligning the General. I joined them and argued the other way while Chuchu went and telephoned again. He came back crestfallen. A strange woman’s voice had told him that the girl was asleep, but he couldn’t help wondering with whom.

So we dined instead with Rogelio and Lidia, and of course the Guatemalan professor turned up a second time – the Sandinistas had agreed to give him lodging because he didn’t want to be alone, since he was still scared of the G-2. He planned to return to Guatemala in two days’ time and he had arranged for a lot of people to be at the airport to meet him in case he disappeared with no one knowing. Would the Dean of the University, I asked, be there? He thought he would.

In the lift going to my bedroom I was greeted by a National Guard officer in a very friendly way. I checked later with Chuchu who was suspicious of some of the National Guard officers.

‘He told me he was Colonel Diaz,’ I said.

Chuchu reassured me. ‘The best man after the General.’

I was not to meet him again for five years and then he would be head of security and the General dead.

6

Next day the plane really took off for Coclesito with the professors and students. The landing strip was only just long enough for us to touch down. It was extremely hot, the village was ankle-deep in mud, the buffaloes were as uninteresting as buffaloes always are and the deep forest lay all around. The girl students and the professors bathed in the river and some of the buffaloes bathed too. The river looked almost ready to flood again. The collective farm provided quite a tasty lunch, but there was nothing except water to quench the thirst.

I looked into the village church. It was falling into ruin and there was a chicken run in the aisle. I remembered what the General had said about neglected cemeteries – here certainly was a neglected church, and I thought unkindly of Archbishop McGrath of Panama. Had he so many churches to look after in the Republic that he couldn’t pay a visit to a village where the General had bothered to build himself a small house? No priest had visited the place for the last year. The people looked to the General and not to the Church for a measure of help. I asked how many days of rain there were in the average year. ‘You don’t ask how many days of rain,’ I was told, ‘you ask how many days without rain and the answer is four.’

Dinner that night back in Panama City was at the flat of a Brazilian refugee, and my suspicion about Chuchu was partly confirmed, for he arrived with the awful Venezuelan woman – was he again in the toils of his tenderness? Among the guests was also an exiled Peruvian general who had been President of the Socialist Party. He told me that in Peru he had had a hundred tanks under his command and he could easily have carried out a
coup,
but he gave up and went into exile for the sake of ‘military honour’. I was glad to think that ‘military honour’ had not stood in the way of Omar Torrijos in 1968, or probably few of these refugees would have been alive.

Time was running out, and I felt the same emotion as the year before, a mixture of impatience for home and regret at leaving. Omar had booked me, as he had promised, from Washington to Paris on the Concorde and he was arranging my Panamanian diplomatic passport. Now he was shut away in the house of Rory González, writing his speech for the signing of the Treaty, and for the time being he was unapproachable.

I had seen less of him than the year before, but my affection had grown. I was beginning to appreciate what he had done and what he had risked in trying to achieve his dream for a Central America which would be socialist and not Marxist, independent of the United States and yet not a menace to her. I felt for him as for a teacher as well as a friend. I was learning from him, even when he was absent, some of the problems of Central America.